Overclocking Capabilities

I'm pretty amazed by the total performance and quality the CoolFX 6800 Ultra offers. But as you all know, all cards hide some more power underneath. This extra power can be released through the overclocking procedure.

Gainward's 6800 Ultra is accompanied by a very nice and easy-to-use tweaking software application named EXPERTool. Below you can see the menu from EXPERTool that rolls up when right clicking it's icon on the taskbar.

When I first installed the card and clicked on the performance button the following window appeared indicating the default core and memory clock speeds.

Selecting the CoolFX Enhanced Mode, the clock speeds reach the limit of 450 and 1200MHz for core and memory respectively. And believe it or not, this is the normal state Gainward's CoolFX 6800 Ultra operaties in. We haven't even overclocked it yet! The CoolFX Enhanced mode was the state I run all the benchmarks.

With trembling hands for the first time in my life, I pushed a VGA card over the 450 and 1200 boundaries. But unfortunately I only managed to overclock the card at 455MHz for it's core and 1250 for the memory.
When I tried to set the core clock speed to 450 MHz, the PC restarted before 3Dmark managed to finish. It seems that if the GPU surpasses a particular temperature, then it restarts the computer. 455 MHz is the maximum core speed I achieved.

As for the memory clock, some artifacts were still visible at 1260MHz.

Maybe there will be a better chance to overclock this card with a Thermaltake case. But I say "maybe" because the cooling method of Gainward's CoolFX 6800 Ultra is internal water-cooling which means that there won't be a big difference in temperature no matter how many fans you use.

I used some games to test the new overclocking values achieved, but the results did not indicate any worthwhile boost in fps. So it would be futile to make any chart indicating 2 or 3 fps difference.